We’re with you, Diane – the Eighties were terrible for hair
It is a perennial complaint of female politicians that while they yearn to discuss matters of substance, the media are interested only in style. Policies schmolicies: who can forget the famous “Legs-it” picture of Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon, their glossily be-stockinged lower limbs bien en valeur, as they say in Brussels?
This sort of sexist rot is surely the reason for Diane Abbott’s ingenious tactic on yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show. Questioned by Marr on her past support for the IRA, she adroitly switched the debate from terrorism to terrible hairdos: “It was 34 years ago. I had a rather splendid afro at the time. I don’t have the same hairstyle and I don’t have the same views.”
At last! A subject on which the middle-aged electorate can unite. For who didn’t have a hairdo 34 years ago that they now, on reflection, regret and indeed unequivocally repudiate? I wince as I type, for back in 1983 I had my own brush with radical hairdressing.
Having worn my hair in the same style since I was six years old – a waist-length curtain channelling The Addams Family’s Cousin Itt – I fell under the influence of Annie Miller’s magnificent chevelure in Holman Hunt’s picture
The Awakening Conscience, and had a pre-raphaelite perm. It involved spending several hours with my hair rolled around dozens of brightly coloured foamrubber worms and the final result was quite a statement. Imagine Crystal Tipps on crystal meth and you have a vague impression of the effect. It took about a decade to grow out, by which time I had concluded – like Diane, in her lengthy interview with Stylist magazine about her ever-changing hair solutions – that a “simple classic look” was the way forward.
Quizzed by Robert Peston on the subject of Diane’s afro, Jeremy Corbyn (a man who, perhaps uniquely among the adult population, has never succumbed to a hairdo more lamentable than the one he has now) remarked that “Diane’s hairstyle is a matter for Diane”.
But in this he is surely mistaken. As that great student of natural history, the Comte de Buffon almost observed, “Le style, c’est la femme”.
Usually, you can spot an evangelist for “healthy” eating at several hundred paces. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, or party candidates, their palpable design upon your unregenerate lifestyle surrounds them in a shimmering aura.
Bit of a shock, then, to find sensible Prue Leith joining the cult as she begins filming the Channel 4 version of The Great British Bake Off. Leith would like, she says, to see “healthy recipes”. Cakes made with butter, eggs and sugar are “not for every day”.
What on earth can she mean? Butter, eggs and sugar are entirely respectable elements of an everyday diet. Teach a child to make a cake and you begin the wider education in cooking with raw ingredients that is the foundation of a healthy relationship with food (and a source of lasting pleasure).
As a lifelong advocate of food education (as well as the author of foodie fiction, including the “Food of Love” trilogy), Leith has been a robust advocate of good food in all its forms. Strange, then, to hear her take up the cry of the 21st-century Marie Antoinettes: “Let them eat veg!”